Clash of Cultures

Some Americans expressed their discontent with the
character of modern life in the 1920s by focusing on family
and religion, as an increasingly urban, secular society
came into conflict with older rural traditions.
Fundamentalist preachers such as Billy Sunday provided an
outlet for many who yearned for a return to a simpler past.

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of this yearning
was the religious fundamentalist crusade that pitted
Biblical texts against the Darwinian theory of biological
evolution. In the 1920s, bills to prohibit the teaching of
evolution began appearing in Midwestern and Southern state
legislatures. Leading this crusade was the aging William
Jennings Bryan, long a spokesman for the values of the
countryside as well as a progressive politician. Bryan
skillfully reconciled his anti-evolutionary activism with
his earlier economic radicalism, declaring that evolution
"by denying the need or possibility of spiritual
regeneration, discourages all reforms."

The issue came to a head in 1925, when a young high school
teacher, John Scopes, was prosecuted for violating a
Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of evolution in the
public schools. The case became a national spectacle,
drawing intense news coverage. The American Civil Liberties
Union retained the renowned attorney Clarence Darrow to
defend Scopes. Bryan wrangled an appointment as special
prosecutor, then foolishly allowed Darrow to call him as a
hostile witness. Bryan's confused defense of Biblical
passages as literal rather than metaphorical truth drew
widespread criticism. Scopes, nearly forgotten in the fuss,
was convicted, but his fine was reversed on a technicality.
Bryan died shortly after the trial ended. The state wisely
declined to retry Scopes. Urban sophisticates ridiculed
fundamentalism, but it continued to be a powerful force in
rural, small-town America.

Another example of a powerful clash of cultures -- one with
far greater national consequences -- was Prohibition. In
1919, after almost a century of agitation, the 18th
Amendment to the Constitution was enacted, prohibiting the
manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic
beverages. Intended to eliminate the saloon and the
drunkard from American society, Prohibition created
thousands of illegal drinking places called "speakeasies,"
made intoxication fashionable, and created a new form of
criminal activity -- the transportation of illegal liquor,
or "bootlegging." Widely observed in rural America, openly
evaded in urban America, Prohibition was an emotional issue
in the prosperous Twenties. When the Depression hit, it
seemed increasingly irrelevant. The 18th Amendment would be
repealed in 1933.

Fundamentalism and Prohibition were aspects of a larger
reaction to a modernist social and intellectual revolution
most visible in changing manners and morals that caused the
decade to be called the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, or
the era of "flaming youth." World War I had overturned the
Victorian social and moral order. Mass prosperity enabled
an open and hedonistic life style for the young middle
classes.

The leading intellectuals were supportive. H.L. Mencken,
the decade's most important social critic, was unsparing in
denouncing sham and venality in American life. He usually
found these qualities in rural areas and among businessmen.
His counterparts of the progressive movement had believed
in "the people" and sought to extend democracy. Mencken, an
elitist and admirer of Nietzsche, bluntly called democratic
man a boob and characterized the American middle class as
the "booboisie."

Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the energy, turmoil,
and disillusion of the decade in such works as The
Beautiful and the Damned (1922) and The Great Gatsby
(1925). Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win a Nobel
Prize for literature, satirized mainstream America in Main
Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922). Ernest Hemingway vividly
portrayed the malaise wrought by the war in The Sun Also
Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). Fitzgerald,
Hemingway, and many other writers dramatized their
alienation from America by spending much of the decade in
Paris.

African-American culture flowered. Between 1910 and 1930,
huge numbers of African Americans moved from the South to
the North in search of jobs and personal freedom. Most
settled in urban areas, especially New York City's Harlem,
Detroit, and Chicago. In 1910 W.E.B. Du Bois and other
intellectuals had founded the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which helped African
Americans gain a national voice that would grow in
importance with the passing years.

An African-American literary and artistic movement, called
the "Harlem Renaissance," emerged. Like the "Lost
Generation," its writers, such as the poets Langston Hughes
and Countee Cullen, rejected middle-class values and
conventional literary forms, even as they addressed the
realities of African-American experience. African-American
musicians -- Duke Ellington, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong
-- first made jazz a staple of American culture in the
1920's.